Tuesday, 24 May 2016

Russia under Putin should be banned from all international sport events after this:

Dozens of Russian athletes at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, including at least 15 medal winners, were part of a state-run doping program, meticulously planned for years to ensure dominance at the Games, according to the director of the country’s antidoping laboratory at the time.

The director, Grigory Rodchenkov, who ran the laboratory that handled testing for thousands of Olympians, said he developed a three-drug cocktail of banned substances that he mixed with liquor and provided to dozens of Russian athletes, helping to facilitate one of the most elaborate — and successful — doping ploys in sports history.

It involved some of Russia’s biggest stars of the Games, including 14 members of its cross-country ski team and two veteran bobsledders who won two golds.

In a dark-of-night operation, Russian antidoping experts and members of the intelligence service surreptitiously replaced urine samples tainted by performance-enhancing drugs with clean urine collected months earlier, somehow breaking into the supposedly tamper-proof bottles that are the standard at international competitions, Dr. Rodchenkov said. For hours each night, they worked in a shadow laboratory lit by a single lamp, passing bottles of urine through a hand-size hole in the wall, to be ready for testing the next day, he said.

By the end of the Games, Dr. Rodchenkov estimated, as many as 100 dirty urine samples were expunged.

None of the athletes were caught doping. More important, Russia won the most medals of the Games, easily surpassing its main rival, the United States, and undermining the integrity of one of the world’s most prestigious sporting events.

“People are celebrating Olympic champion winners, but we are sitting crazy and replacing their urine,” Dr. Rodchenkov said. “Can you imagine how Olympic sport is organized?”

Corruption pervades everything in Putin´s kleptocracy. This rotten mafia state does not deserve to be part of any civilized international co-operation. That´s why Russia should be banned from the RioOlympic games. And, of course, FIFA (with its own corruption problems) should not allow Russia to host the football World Cup.

"When future historians will be studying the present global mass hysteria about alleged catastrophic man-made global warming (MMGW), they will most likely shake their heads in total disbelief. They may well compare it with other such historic irrational hysterias, like the tulipomania in Holland in the 17th century. […] The belief that human emissions of carbon dioxide cause, or will cause catastrophic global warming is a […] totalitarian belief. It does not allow ‘critical discussion’. Those scientists who try are vilified. Over the years I collected the following abuses: ‘climate change deniers’, ‘cashamplified flat-earth pseudo scientists’, ‘the carbon cartel’, ‘villains’, ‘cranks’, ‘refuseniks lobby’, ‘polluters’, ‘a powerful and devious enemy’, ‘profligates’. The list is endless. […] By saying that the science of climate change is ‘settled’ and not open to further discussion, clearly shows that the belief in man-made global warming is not based on proper science, but is a neo-Marxist, intolerant ideology. It is anti-science, anti-capitalist, anti-democracy, anti-growth, anti-humanity, anti-progress.”

Monday, 23 May 2016

Writer and broadcaster Paul Mason presents the leftwing case for Brexit:The leftwing case for Brexit is strategic and clear. The EU is not – and cannot become – a democracy. Instead, it provides the most hospitable ecosystem in the developed world for rentier monopoly corporations, tax-dodging elites and organised crime. It has an executive so powerful it could crush the leftwing government of Greece; a legislature so weak that it cannot effectively determine laws or control its own civil service. A judiciary that, in the Laval and Viking judgments, subordinated workers’ right to strike to an employer’s right do business freely.Its central bank is committed, by treaty, to favour deflation and stagnation over growth. State aid to stricken industries is prohibited. The austerity we deride in Britain as a political choice is, in fact, written into the EU treaty as a non-negotiable obligation. So are the economic principles of the Thatcher era. A Corbyn-led Labour government would have to implement its manifesto in defiance of EU law.

And the situation is getting worse. Europe’s leaders still do not know whether they will let Greece go bankrupt in June; they still have no workable plan to distribute the refugees Germany accepted last summer, and having signed a morally bankrupt deal with Turkey to return the refugees, there is now the prospect of that deal’s collapse. That means, if the reported demand by an unnamed Belgian minister to “push back or sink” migrant boats in the Aegean is activated, the hands of every citizen of the EU will be metaphorically on the tiller of the ship that does it. You may argue that Britain treats migrants just as badly. The difference is that in Britain I can replace the government, whereas in the EU, I cannot.That’s the principled leftwing case for Brexit.